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Apr 22, 2011

The family that cooks together....

I have learned a valuable lesson about Roasted Vegetable Pizza. The combination of 500 degree temperature and burning, which results in the fire detector going off even though there was nothing to detect and I had the situation at hand. Just to be clear, there was nothing burning and no result whatsoever but the fire detector disagreed, resulting in a ruined Thursday night dinner with me standing under the fire detector fanning it to stop the loud and annoying beeping and me being too afraid to cook anything else.

So together Rob and I attempted to make the pizza tonight....

The recipe was really quite simple. The only thing you don't make is the pizza crust, which the recipe called for an Italian-style cheese kind but I just used a regular thin crust pizza crust. And you also don't make the sauce which the recipe says to use a commercial pesto, which I couldn't find and wasn't completely sure what it was so I ended up buying a pesto with basil but I figured it was okay because there was basil in the recipe...right?

The first step was making the topping of the pizza, which was zucchini, grape tomatoes, red onion, salt, pepper, and olive oil. You mix that well then cook for 18 minutes at 500 degrees. Unlike my first attempt I had a little help tonight, which definitely make the waiting much better.

We finally got down to business because we had to assemble the pizza crust so it was ready to go in for five minutes to toughen up before we added everything to it and cooked it. Much to our surprise the pizza crust came out square, which was a bit unexpected. But we rounded it up to make it more pizzaish. It doesn't look great but we never claimed to be artists.

We took the vegetables out as directed and put the pizza in for the five minutes before taking it out to put the pizza together and cooking it for another seven minutes at 500 degrees.

After putting it in the oven to crisp up the crust, you spread on the basil pesto. I'm not sure if the commercial pesto the recipe recommends would be better but this was actually better than I thought, once I got over it being really green.

Then you add all the toppings.

I kept peeking in to see if it was done. It definitely wasn't required but I felt it was necessary after all the trouble I had been having with this silly meal.

The timer was about to go off so I was showing Rob that I was pumped and ready to a) eat this pizza and b) conquer my fear of really hot ovens.

The crust looks a little burnt but actually it was quiet perfect. We add a little more cheese right after and now know to put more cheese on it to begin with.

Well, this meal was definitely good. It was better than I thought it was going to be. It seems to be that way with every meal in this book so far. It's a weird mix of foods, including some I have never had before but it has definitely been the best cook book I have used. So we have another success on our hands. And what was even better about this meal was that we cooked it together.